Somewhere on the outskirts of reason... Or where good television can be found.

Thursday, November 03, 2005

KISS 'Raleigh 7/27/04 Alltel Pavillion'

Every Halloween, my friend Sean Whitley hosts a get-together at his pad. We hoist a few alcoholic beverages, eat profusely, and watch those seasonal types of movies. I can’t seriously use the word “scary” because most of the films that we watch are low-budget and horribly bad works of cinema.

We watched ‘Revolt Of The Zombies’, ‘White Zombie’ with Bela Lugosi, and a few other highly forgetful flicks.

I remember trying to watch ‘White Zombie’ years ago when WGHP ran “Shock Theatre” on Saturday nights. Within minutes of the start of the film, I was bored and flipped over to Saturday Night Live. I thought that I was too young, lacking patience to watch the movie.

Now that I’m more mature and able to sit for hours in front of a television, I realize that ‘White Zombie’ isn’t worth the time to watch. It was BAD! But if you’ve seen ‘Ed Wood’, you get to see Bela’s hand trick where you have to be “double-jointed” and Hungarian. It was nice to see that bit of history put into perspective.

The one movie that didn’t suck that we watched was John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’.

I had not seen this film since about 1984 when it ran on HBO. I liked it, but I never fully took the time to take it all in. And during the run of it at Sean’s, I got distracted and left to pick Kim up at her house to join in the festivities.

When we got back, they had started up some bad “zombie” flick. So, I asked Sean if I could borrow it and take it home to watch.

Surprisingly, ‘The Thing’ still holds up to this day even though it was made back in 1982. The storyline holds up. It doesn’t look that dated except when Kirk Russell is playing a Chess Wizard video game. And the special effects… Damn if they don’t hold up too!

When it comes to horror movies, I’m a desensitized bastard. I rarely get scared or excited. But the scene where Russell is checking everyone’s blood with a hot wire to find out who the alien-infected are, I nearly jumped out of my chair and I believe that I shouted a loud curse word when that thing jumped out of the petridish.

That to me is a sign of a very good film.

If you’ve never seen it, give it a shot. I liked it so much that I’m thinking about purchasing a copy for myself.

The paranoia about the characters not knowing who might be infected makes it very creepy.

‘The Thing’ is also one of those remakes (‘The Thing From Another Planet’) that are as good, if not better, than the original.

Lets open up the debate… Use the comments section and make the call on the best remakes. From what the site meter tells me, there are a lot of people reading this so do it! It’s okay to have an opinion and you can even be anonymous.

2 comments:

The original Invasion Of The Body Snatchers is good, but I like the 1979 version just as much. Same goes for the original Dawn Of The Dead and its remake. Heaven Can Wait is better than the original, Here Comes Mr. Jordan (the original is still entertaining). The remake of Ocean's Eleven was better-made than the original, but I'll still watch the Rat-Pack version when it airs.